China has had a lot of business challenges lately. Between lead in toys, poison in pet food, and just today an article on blue-ear pig disease, it would be nice to have some good news.

So it was great to hear today that China now has a new IBM System p5-575 supercomputer cluster to work on weather models for the Olympics in Beijing. The Beijing Meteorological Bureau announced that it has acquired this IBM supercomputer to aid in weather forecasting and air-quality control.

The 80-node IBM System p5-575 delivers peak performance of 9.8 teraflops, ranking it among the ten fastest supercomputers in China, according to the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Good thing computers can also help in manufacturing and pandemics.

************************************************The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

Next week I hope to be climbing to the top of the highest mountain range east of the Rockies. When you reach the top of one of these mountains you are standing on bare rock, with a view for miles and miles around. And if you're still not sure you've reached the top, you can always find that metal marker forced into the granite, validating your day of trail mix.

IBM once again has reached the top in the brand new TOP500 list of supercomputer sites. IBM dominates the aggregate performance with 41.6% vs. HP with 24.2%. Sun has .9% - yes, that's less than 1%. IBM dominates the TOP10 (with 6) and the TOP100 (with 45). IBM's BlueGene/L remains the #1 supercomputer in the world for the fourth straight year.

There are so many things to brag about on this one, including being a leader in the 15 Teraflop Club.

Yesterday NASA selected an IBM System p5-575 cluster to meet the agency's future supercomputing requirements. NASA picked the IBM supercomputer to play a critical role in many NASA missions, including new space vehicle design, global climate studies and astrophysics research.

This system has 640 computational cores and a peak performance of approximately 5.6 teraflops. A teraflop equals a trillion floating point operations per second.

5.6 trillion sounds really big. Until you consider that IBM's BlueGene/L system that is currently #1 on the TOP500 supercomputer list is 280.6 trillion (floating point operations per second).

And this really is rocket science.

************************************************Source: http://www.top500.org. All results as of 6/07/07.

The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.